>> It's strange - I can sit down and play the music endlessly for 2 days 
>> straight, but as soon as I hit the record button, I start making 
>> mistakes all over the place. :-S Most irritating!
> 
> It's called "choke". How many times do you think professional basketball 
> players miss foul shots in practice? :-)

Uh... I have no idea, but "sure".

>> However... this only works if one note is near another. My hands 
>> "know" how wide the keys are. But if I need to move my whole hand to a 
>> different part of the keyboard, I still need to be able to see where 
>> I'm going. If that makes sense...
> 
> Yes, it certainly does. I've heard interviews with professional pianists 
> who say they can just put their hands in front of them and hear the 
> notes their fingers are touching.

As an aside... before I got my shiny new soundcard, there used to be an 
80 ms delay between pressing a key and hearing some sound.

Do you have ANY IDEA how off-putting that is??!?

It made it virtually impossible to play anything faster than a 
slow-dance without totally screwing up. Seriously, you wouldn't believe 
what a huge problem such a tiny little split-second delay is!

>> Thanks! I spent literally *days* decoding the score and rehersing the 
>> playing. ;-)
> 
> Yep. That's not a lot of time for something like that, tho. That's my 
> point. Even in high-school band, memorizing the music for the year was 
> probably two weeks to a month of an hour every day before school. Doing 
> that in just days is pretty impressive, especially given that it's a 
> piano (with concurrent notes) and not a trumpet or something.

In fairness, I learned the first two pages a couple of weeks back. It's 
only the second half of the passage I played which is new to me. I 
learned that this weekend. It was hard work! o_O

As somebody who used to play the violin, let me tell you: a violin 
[usually] only plays one note at a time, but you still need two hands to 
do the correct thing [in a *coordinated* mannar] to produce that note, 
so it's still just as hard.

Indeed, you don't even need complex chords. I have a lot of trouble 
trying to play "Dance of the Snowmen" from The Snowman, and that doesn't 
have any chords at all. Even playing with one hand, it's hard just to 
hit the notes fast enough and not miss the keys and remember which note 
comes next fast enough to play the thing. There aren't even any key 
changes and it's hard! ;-)

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